About

About Thinkbig

Thinkbig lab has become the blog of Thinkbig Factoryand Openarch project. By now Ion Cuervas-Mons is the writer of all posts but there will be new writers soon. The areas we are interested in are architecture, cities, strategic design, advanced tecnologies, design thinking, smart cities, internet of things, user experience and interaction design.

Thinkbig Factory is an architecture and design consultancy that creates opportunities between digital and physical realities helping organizations to grow and innovate.

As usual it is a stolen title , from a book by Donald A. Schon which I have not received yet but I hope when I get it will provide me enough material to write about. It explains how we think when we do things. Generally, designers do not recognize in the theories which are written about creative processes, but according to Edwin Gardner (in this text) this book describes successfully how the designers think.

In my opinion it is a mistake to separate the theory from the practice, and a problem when the necessary bonds to stablish fruitful connections are broken. In architecture the disconnection is obvious. In recent decades each one is acting in an independent way. Besides, seems logical if the practice pursue the reality that the theory should be the part which be supposed to take the initiative to the reconciliation.

“From legitimating to understanding practice” that is how Edwin Gardner subtitles a text about theory and practice written for the Volume magazine . The architecture went from being entitled by sacred traditions of an ancient profession to be legitimized by different manifests based on new ideologies, and afterwards through -isms such as deconstructivism, structuralism, etc. Somehow the theory is still anchored in certain left side ideologies that prevent to interact with the practice which inevitably is tied up to hyper-capitalist conditions.

A theory closer to practice should allow better understanding of the creative processes involved in the architecture and not merely analyzing the results. In this aspect the design (understanding as the product design) is going ahead, all people is speaking about design thinking, because it has established a deep understanding of how it develops, brainstorming, prototyping… And this is useful for 3 important things: transcend the discipline, teach better and extend the individual creation to the collective creation (see the video). As architects we can learn from this, after all is theory of creativity, but my question is: Is there anything on creative processes specifically architectural?

AMO has been researching and implementing this idea for years, using many architectural tools such as diagrams, maps… to problems that transcend the discipline (see project). Dan Hill (city of sound), in this post, makes an analogy with the method acting (in reference to the Stanislavski method) and describes the method design as the necessary cultural immersion to realize a project. A process which is very architectural due to the great importance of context in any built event. A method that consciously and unconsciously informs the design process.

It has been six months of hard work, generating many ideas and understanding the opportunities that emerging technologies are opening up for Tesco. We have identified customer trends and we are starting to form prototypes of some products. Tesco is at the forefront of innovation within retail. This project is highly confidential, so at this [...]